Tonight at midnight EST, tune in to MTV 2, mtvU, VH1 or VH1 Classic to watch the full 30 minute version of Beastie Boys’ “Fight For Your Right Revisited.” It airs again 3 hours later on Palladia, and uncensored on Comedy Central at 3 AM EST. If you wanna, check in to the premiere on GetGlue at http://bit.ly/fKmViB and you can unlock a Beastie Boys sticker thingy.”

Ok, first of all– Reagan’s new salon is awesome. I have been there a few times, mostly to pick her up for a dinner date, etc.. Everyone I have met at the salon (including both of the owners) has been super cool to me. The space is beautiful. The decor is fantastic. They even have their own designer scent (FYI, it is nothing like that crap that Abercrombie pumps through its vents). Anyway, Reagan invited me over to her salon on a day when it is closed (Monday, yesterday)  to help shoot a rite of passage for one of her coworkers. When someone crosses over from assistant to stylist, they make kind of a big deal about it (since it is a pretty big deal). The person being promoted organizes a presentation with various models that they have styled. The image above was from the presentation last night. The entire presentation was equally impressive.

Onto the giveaway portion of this post. K, I have to say that I was a little bit amused by the amount of lovely commenters vying for the tote. I guess that dollar value isn’t always the definitive factor when anticipating interest in giveaways. I also learned that apparently a large portion of ppl who read JNB purchase produce from farmers markets and CSAs. Pretty dope. I would just like to take this opportunity to say that I have now been off the Papa Johns for about a week and a half. Reagan and I have bilaterally resolved to try to eat in more often. So, someday I might have the energy to go the extra mile and reduce my carbon footprint and all that. Next– I was generally very entertained/impressed with basically ALL of the comments. Because of this, I once again found myself in a bit of bind while trying to select a winner. The solution? First, I realized after posting gvwy5 that I actually have two of the featured totes. This was only slightly before my sister started hounding me on G-chat with “dude, you gotta give it to Jenn. Did you read her comment?” My reaction was yes and yes. Jenn, it is only right that I float you a new tote to relieve your pretty green one that has led such a valiant life, carrying yahtzee jr and other treasures. I mean, it is Autism awareness month, after all.

For the second winner, I did what any person in my situation would do, and turned to random.org. Bee, I’m not going to lie, I’m pretty glad that “7″ was the number that came up. I can’t tell you how many times I have used my favorite tote to safely transport my after hours footwear. I don’t currently own a pair of Chucks, but I’m glad that you do. I’m even more glad that this tote will facilitate you being able to transport them and rock them at will.

So, Jenn and Bee, please hit me up with your shipping addy’s when you have a free moment and I will have your new tote bags shipped off to you post haste. Also, congratulations.

Who else is that smiley with an earful of suds? The previous sentence is as far as I got, Sunday afternoon, when I tried for like 3 hours to initially draft this thing. We have had some sort of crazy stuff happen with Piper, over the last week. She is doing fine. But, because of the lack of long term facilities in the NYC area who care for vent dependent children, Piper may have to move to Albany. Reagan explained it pretty well over here. It was a great post. We have had such an overwhelming response that the traffic spike caused the server to fail. So, that coupled with an inept hosting reseller caused her page to be down for most of the day yesterday (and mine, actually).

For those who are interested in the details of what is happening, and why, here is a letter* that I wrote to our state senator on Friday:

Dear Senator,

I am writing you today to ask for your help in keeping my family together. We are about to be separated because of inadequacies in the NYS long term health care policy.

My daughter Piper was born to my wife Reagan and I in 2007 at Columbia Hospital. She has a rare congenital health problem which requires her to be on a ventilator. After a miraculous birth and spending several months in the NICU and PICU, she was discharged to a rehabilitation facility in Westchester County. She has been declared disabled and is currently covered by SSI. Although she has fought an uphill battle her entire life, Piper has made great improvements at the facility where she is now. But, every time she makes enough progress that she is considered stable, she must be referred to a long term care facility. The fact that she must go to a long term care facility is the problem per se. The problem is that the closest facility licensed to care for children on vents is over two hours away from where we live.

Our daughter could also be discharged to our home, but the current financial situation of my wife and I doesn’t allow for it. We currently live in a 5^th floor walk up in Washington Heights. In order for her to be discharged to our care at home, we would have to live in a more modern building with backup power and an elevator. Unfortunately, that type of move is not fiscally possible right now.

The only long term care facilities that are currently licensed to care for vent patients (according to our daughter’s social worker), are far from New York City. One is in Albany, and the other is in Smithtown. There is currently one facility in the City which has 4 long term beds, but they are moving to Yonkers and will not be accepting any new patients until early next year. Even when their new facility does open (scheduled for next January), it will only have a few additional vent beds, and there is no guaranty that Piper will be admitted there.

We recently found out that the place in Smithtown is also now out. Since our daughter is beginning to learn to walk, she would need one-to-one care, which they are not set up to provide. This makes the only long term care option for our daughter, a facility in Albany. We have been told that our daughter will have to move there next week. As I’m sure you are aware, Albany is not a short distance from NYC, not even Washington Heights. We will now have to travel over two hours to see our daughter.

It seems very counter intuitive to me that the facilities licensed for vent children are so far away from the most highly populated area in New York. Despite having our daughter live at Blythedale Children’s Hospital in Westchester for most of her life, my wife and I have been able to maintain a meaningful relationship with her. My wife has been able to arrange her work schedule so that she can travel to visit 4 times per week. I visit her on the weekends. Although not ideal, the 40 minute drive to Blythedale (which is not accessible by public transportation from NYC) is manageable.

Blythedale is currently being remodeled and will be much larger in the short future, but is not licensed to receive SSI funds from the State for long term care. From what I have been told, Blythedale applied to the State for the license, but was denied. Apparently the reason that NYS gave was that there was not a need for more of such facilities. I can say from my own experience that this is not the case.

On two prior occasions, our daughter was sent to a facility in New Jersey called Wanaque. This is the only facility in NJ (from what I’m told) that NY State will allow SSI funds to go to, for NYS disabled kids. There are at least 3 other families that we know personally, who live in NYC, but have also had children discharged to Wanaque. Both times that our daughter was admitted there, the level of care was so low, that she developed pneumonia and almost died. Luckily she was close enough to Columbia that she was able to be transported and cared for by her pediatric doctors that have known her since birth.

If a similar situation were to occur in Albany, she could be dead before we are even able to arrive at the hospital.

I understand that in most cases, vent dependent children who are in long term care have very low cognitive function and as such, do not normally have meaningful relationships with their families. But in our case, we have a very meaningful relationship with our daughter. She is our only family for 2000 miles. And now she is going to be shipped off to rot in a facility upstate because of a systemic inadequacy.

I don’t know if there is anything that you can do, but any efforts in our behalf would be greatly appreciated.

Regards, Jacob Breinholt (on behalf of myself, my wife Reagan and our daughter Piper)

*I have since regretted publicly posting this letter because of one Joy MacMillan. Apparently it isn’t completely obvious that this letter is a very brief overview of the situation. When I wrote the reference to the “fiscal” impediments of moving, it was an easy was to sum up a lot of very complicated factors. I applaud Joy, that she was able to find a living situation that worked for the her and her family. I apologize if my letter gave  the wrong impression about our priorities and family values. I know how easy it is get get judgy, especially when I don’t have all of the information.

Lesson learned. I’ll stick to the less personal stuff from now on.

So, yeah. There are still some things up in the air. There is also an appeal process. Reagan and I are still trying to figure out the best way to handle this situation. All of the support and kind words have been sincerely appreciated. Here are a few more shots from the weekend:

Two posts in a row bearing titles that begin with the word “happy.”

I couldn’t help but post photos of the shoes that I wore out last night. Yes, two photos of my shoes.

“What is happening to this blog?”, a reader might be asking themselves as they scroll down from one photo of green shoes to the next. The answer is– I don’t really know what is happening to it. The story behind the shoes is: Reagan picked them up for me last summer at one of the Bottega Veneta sample sales that she goes to. They have been sitting in my closet since then. I had only worn them once before last night. In fact, I had kind of forgotten about them. Then, last night as I was debating on what to wear out, there were the loafers blinding me with the green light that was reflecting off of that patent leather. Hahahaha. It was like destiny. Since I don’t own the green Rolie from the previous post, I had to rock some green loafers instead.

Now that the nonsense is out of the way. Let’s get down to brass tacks. As we all know, things are still not going well at all for the folks in Japan. There are a lot of bloggers who are doing this day of blog silence thing, which I think is cool. But, I have decided go a different route in acknowledging that I am still thinking and worrying about the Japanese. Similar to last Friday, I’m going to share some links that I found inspiring, relating to the events that are unfolding in Japan. Maybe someone else will also be inspired.

• This is probably my favorite one. An 85 year old woman escaped the tsunami by riding her bike to safety when she heard the warning sirens going off.
• Boston Globe Big Picture March 17
• Boston Globe Big Picture March 16
• Boston Globe Big Picture March 15
• Boston Globe Big Picture March 14
• Boston Globe Big Picture March 13
• Photos  from Operation Tomodachi– This is a Flickr set that the US Navy Published documenting their disaster relief mission in Japan called “Operation Tomodachi.”
• And finally, here is an article that the NY Times published about the initial 50 volunteers who stayed behind when the Fukushima Plant was evacuated. I feel like the facts in this story could very easily become a movie. I was very affected by the courage of these workers. I feel like their willingness to stay behind really epitomize the selfless solidarity that is associated with Japanese culture.

On a more lighthearted note, don’t miss the “Super Moon” this weekend. I’m hoping for clear skies on Saturday night.  Don’t get me started about how excited I am for GP on Sunday. Have a great weekend!

Is it too early to start getting excited?

Last night I had a pretty fun editorial shoot for Edwin Jeans, using hip hop artist Gilbere Forte as the model. Here is a sample:

I’ll post the set to shotbyjake.com when I finish editing, etc..

Reagan was able to get to Michigan, safe and sound. Today is another blizzard, to liven up my already hectic day. That’s pretty much the gist of what’s going on over here.

I recently finished reading the latest issue of GQ. Toward the end of the mag, they had this little editorial previewing stuff for spring. One of the first images was the one above, that I grabbed from the GQ website. It is a photo of Arnie Hammer, apparently about to knock someone’s teeth out with an early 90′s-style skateboard. I don’t know if their inspiration here was the movie “Kids” or what. I mean, I get the styling. Skateboarding is now very “in.” But we don’t want to seem too trendy, so we are going to throw in a old-school wide deck and give a nod to.. blah blah blah.

All of that crap is peripheral. Do you notice the particular model of deck that Hammer is holding? That’s right, it is a Vision “Gator” pro-model. And where is Gator (AKA Mark Rogowski) these days? That’s right, he is serving time in a Federal prison. What was the crime again? Correct, again! He murdered his ex-girlfriend by bludgeoning her to death after raping her.

So my question to you, Mr. prop stylist, is:  Are you completely oblivious to this apparent faux pas, or is there some sort of hidden meaning in this image?

Shooting from the hip, flying by night, whatever you want to call it. That’s what I have been up to. Actually it would have been nice if there would have been a little more flying by night going on over the past few days. We have been trying to get Reagan on a plane so that she can go visit some family before she starts her new job. Unfortunately, snow happened. Because of all of the craziness, I have been canceling, rescheduling, then canceling just about everything on my calendar, since Monday. Reagan is booked again for a flight leaving tomorrow afternoon. Let’s hope that the stars align for this one, because I’m not sure if either of our nerves could handle a repeat of yesterday.

A few things that I did manage to accomplish:

1. I bought Reagan a new camera in anticipation of her voyage. It is a compact. She likes ones that she can take around with her in her purse. It is a pretty good one. I was tempted to just get her a G12, because I’m so loyal to Canon. Instead, I ultimately ended up going with a Samsung TL500, which also shoots RAW, was $100 more affordable, and has a Shneidler lens (that opens to f/1:1.8). I hope it works out for her.

2. I updated my Linux operating system. About a year ago I put together a little Linux box running on Ubuntu, so that I could back up all of my images. After I got all of the drives installed and setup the OS, I haven’t even had it hooked up to a monitor. The only times I have had to restart it, is when the power went out (when Reagan blew a breaker with her blowdryer). Everything is running swimmingly. I just unloaded about 300 GBs of images onto a brand new virgin drive on the Linux machine overnight. So, that is my plug for open source everything.

That’s about it. The image at the top is just a cropped screenshot of myGMail inbox. Do you ever have those moments where there is so much going on in your brain simlutaneously, that you just kind of short circuit and everything becomes abstract? I was having one of those moments when I made the screengrab.

(photo I posted it because I was archiving last year’s stuff, and I came across it. It has nothing to do with this post, except for the fact that breakdancing is still awesome in 2011)

I have been thinking pretty long and hard about some resolutions for this year. The only ones that were coming quickly to mind were jokes. Like: Resolved, I’m going to get as fat as possible in 2011. That way, if I don’t achieve my goal, I’m stoked, because I won’t be fat. If I do get as fat as possible, I could say that I finally kept my resolution.

Then I started coming up with things like “demonstrate more patience.” How in the world can something like that be quantified, though? I mean, do I keep tally marks from month to month for each time I catch myself groaning about someone’s (possibly my own)  incompetence– then if December has less tally marks than January, I succeeded? What if I encounter more incompetence in January than in December?

Finally, it dawned on me. I have fallen out of some pretty good habits, and into some less than good ones. Reversing those items will be a win-win. Instead of grinding away with the tally marks all year long, I can knock out all of the hard work in just a few months, while I force myself to get back on track. After that I can coast through the rest of the year by just doing maintenance while I reap the benefits. So, down to brass tacks:

1. Get more rest. During the winter it is so easy to just get sucked into all night projects. I mean, it is dark for more than half of the time that I’m awake each day. I have fallen into the habit of burning away the night working on projects that I invent for myself. Then I wake up feeling like crap. After a few days, my productivity starts to wane and I eventually just have to waste half of a weekend catching up on sleep. This is not only totally unproductive, but it also pisses off Reagan.. bad.
2. Stop eating just to break up the monotony. Even when I was burning through 90000000 calories a day by running, I only ate one meal per day. Partly because it was all I had time for. Partly because that was the only time that I was really hungry. In reality, I’m still only hungry once per day. But I have fallen into a stupid habit of eating just for an excuse to get away from my desk. I find myself eating second dinner at times.
3. Stop spreading myself too thin. Sometimes I will overbook myself, because I have a hard time saying no. Sometimes I can pull it off. Most of the time, at least one job ends up suffering. I think that if I slow down enough to devote my whole attention to whatever I’m working on, the results will definitely reflect it.
4. Start running again. Hi, I used to be a runner. Then the temperature dropped and it was dark a lot, so I stopped. Completely. Reagan got me a Garmin 410 for Christmas that is still sitting safely in it’s packaging. Starting this week, I’m going to run at least once per week until I can catch the fever again and dive back in headlong (probably when the temps start getting above 50, again).
5. Start shaving. I just threw that one in because it will be so easy, hahahaha. Sorry Mr. Beardo (and Reagan). It’s the end of the beard as we know it.

And, that is kind of a lot to tackle. But, here we go. Hold me accountable, amigos.

Yes, the rumors are true. NYC actually really did get a legitimate snow storm. I used to snicker to myself when they would shut down the schools here because of snow. Growing up in SLC, I recall nary a time when schools were closed because of snow. I haven’t done any side by side statistical comparisons, but from my own observations, it snows in SLC with much greater frequency and quantity than in Downstate NY. But I’m here to tell you that yesterday/last night, we really did get a storm. Apparently they measured 20 inches in Central Park (fun fact: snow removal costs the City approximately 1 million dollars per inch). As if that wasn’t enough. The wind has been strong all night and today. So there are places where it has drifted to depths of double over-head. You can see how much it is blowing in the photo above. Those streaks at the top of the frame are flying snow flakes (keep in mind this was with a 1/500″ shutter speed). Needless to say, there aren’t a lot of people going outside today, that don’t have to. Reagan’s salon was closed, and I am working from home. We took a break to go dig out our car. Luckily, we were parked on one of the more exposed streets. So, the wind had actually blown most of the accumulation further inland. Below is a shot of our block.

The shot below is of Reagan discovering America showing off her new shovel.

Above: about to start digging, check out the wind on Reagan’s hair. Below: testing wind conditions.

Have a great week!